Richard Charkin is an unrepentant thief. Charkin, a UK executive with publisher Macmillan, attended last week’s Book Expo America in New York and decided to make his feelings about Google Book Search clear by teaching Google a lesson: he stole two of the company’s laptops.

His point was that Google Book Search is “stealing” the work of authors and publishers without permission, and Charkin wanted to see if Google’s boffins enjoyed having the same thing done to them. He recounts the incident on his personal blog. “A colleague and I simply picked up two computers from the Google stand and waited in close proximity until someone noticed,” he says. “This took more than an hour. Our justification for this appalling piece of criminal behaviour? The owner of the computer had not specifically told us not to steal it. If s/he had, we would not have done so. When s/he asked for its return, we did so. It is exactly what Google expects publishers to expect and accept in respect to intellectual property.”

The traditional argument against item-level RFID is that it only makes economic sense for products costing more than $100, but that assumes one-time use. In a trial with reusable tags, Staples is throwing out all the old rules.

Staples in late May started its trial at one of its Montreal stores, selectively tagging about 2,000 items, representing some 300 SKUs out of the 7,500 SKUs in a typical location, said Joe Soares, director of process engineering for Staples and Business Depot.

The tags themselves are higher-end active tags, which would typically cost Staples between $5 and $8 each.

Google Inc.’s privacy practices are the worst among the Internet’s top destinations, according to a watchdog group seeking to intensify the recent focus on how the online search leader handles personal information about its users.

In a report released Saturday, London-based Privacy International assigned Google its lowest possible grade. The category is reserved for companies with “comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy.”

None of the 22 other surveyed companies — a group that included Yahoo Inc.. Microsoft Corp. and AOL — sunk to that level, according to Privacy International.